Archive for April, 2012

We have been GA for one month today. A lot has happened in that time; mostly good.

1. We have signed many paying customers. We are well ahead of our plans for customer counts (thank you!) but are always looking to do better.

2. Product quality has been really good. We’ve definitely had some customers find bugs in corner case infrastructure situations and we’ve jumped on those, but for the majority of situations – rock solid.

3. Added to the team. Several new, highly talented engineers have joined in the last month, and we promoted one of our team into the engineering director position (he’s doing great). Happy to report that we’ve had an offer accepted for someone to help build strategic partnerships for us and we are looking at hiring a second sales exec.

4. Lots of customer feedback on the usability and functionality that the solution provides. As a result we will be iterating rapidly to respond to that feedback and take things to the next level.

5. Customer engagement – we are still learning this one. We really want to help our customers get the maximum value from Boundary, but often times customers are so busy that they are hard to get hold of. We have to do better.

6. Pricing – plenty of feedback. No, it’s not yet published on the web site as we are still learning but yes, we will do so.

Next up for Boundary is to deliver the next set of capabilities. After research by the engineering team, we have decided on what those capabilities will be and are busy doing the sprint planning to support them. There are many exciting capabilities planned and I love the way that, now we’ve built this tremendous architecture and foundation, we can iterate quickly.

All in all I’d say we are celebrating our 1 month birthday with a smile on our face but always conscious of continuing to exceed our customer’s very high expectations.

Congrats to Godfrey and the entire Splunk team for their IPO today. Splunk has been around for many years and this company has done a fabulous job of navigating the changing market, creating innovative solutions and messaging but best of all, executing like crazy.

It’s easy to forget the amount of years of hard work that are required to get a company to this stage but I can say that if you make it in infrastructure management, then you undoubtedly deserve it. Splunk and the “coming soon” Service-now IPO are showing investors that there is huge value to be had in the overall IT mgmt space.

Infrastructures are fundamentally changing and when fundamental change happens, incumbents get disrupted.

Change is happening in….

1. Infrastructure has moved from static (datacenter) to dynamic (cloud)
2. App stacks are changing from the packaged and commercial BEA, .NET, Oracle etc stacks to the open source Hadoop, NoSQL etc stacks
3. Customers are increasingly accessing business apps via mobile – meaning even a few seconds of downtime or poor performance are cause for concern.

Taken together, these changes mean that incumbent solutions in IT mgmt are simply not equipped to deal with this new world.